(satire) *Witnesses Assumed Charlie Kirk Shooter Was Just Ordinary Gunman On School Campus.*

Bolsonaro and seven of his highest officials have been convicted of trying to launch a coup.

The plan included assassinating the just-reelected former president Lula, and others too. It failed because the army and air force commanders refused to join it.

Bolsonaro's followers are pleasing for the government to pardon him in the name of "peace", but the right-wing supporters of racist nationalism and absolutism never make peace — they never stop scheming and lying to take power,

The bullshitter hates wind turbines, and promotes a wide range of imaginary reasons to get rid of them. This article checks the facts of them. Some are based on partial truth, but it isn't enough truth to justify rejecting wind power.

He might have some rational reason — rational for him, that is: his fossil-fool backers will make more money if we fail to make and use enough wind power.

The article leaves me wondering whether Britain is painting its wind farm blades black to protect birds, and also whether it is upgrading its electrical grid and battery storage so that it can utilize all the electric energy that its wind farms can generate.

Robert Reich: *If it's to have a future, the Democratic Party must not only condemn Trumpism but explain why so many Americans are struggling and provide a credible way for most people to share in the nation's prosperity.*

*IDF soldiers deliberately wounding children in Gaza "like a game", says British doctor.* The doctor reached this conclusion in Gaza based on treating many wounded children and noting the day-to-day variation in what kind of wounds were being made that day.

He also reported that many of the patients he operated on later died because they did not get enough food to recover properly.

Would-be Republican candidates demonstrate perverse cruelty to win Republican votes in primary elections.

Various former officials reproach the US government for choosing killing the people in a boat in the Caribbean, in disregard of US law, rather than arresting them and perhaps charging them with crimes (supposing there was evidence they were committing any crimes).

*Some US senators said that the US is complicit in Israel's ethnic cleansing of Gaza.*

This is clearly true. Ethnic cleansing is the clearest term I know of to describe what Israel is doing to Gaza.

A suggestion to make it a crime to publish output from an LLM without explicitly labeling it as such.

This could be a good idea, provided it avoids the marketing campaign of calling LLMs "intelligence" and referring to the output as "content" as if that were a sort of commodity.

There is a wave of antisemitism accusations against professors who criticize Israel's injustice toward Palestinians.

The same rules against atrocities that apply to other countries apply to Israel as well, and talking about those atrocities is not antisemitic at all.

Pilot dies after plane carrying nearly 200kg of SpaceX-branded cocaine crashes in remote Brazil:

Authorities said the pilot was found dead outside the aircraft after it crashed in Coruripe, an area on Brazil's tropical coastline, according to G1 Globo.

Federal police said they had identified evidence of international drug trafficking, the outlet also reported.

Top notch police work there, guys!

The fire department was called at 1.48pm on Sunday and six officers were dispatched to the scene following concerns of an explosion, although there was no detonation, according to Em Tempo Noticias. Debris from the plane and drugs were scattered across the field.

Local media said between 180kg and 195kg of cocaine was found in the aircraft. More than 187 packets of cocaine were found with what appeared to be fake SpaceX packaging.

"Appeared to be". "The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command."

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Stephen Miller Is Leading Donald Trump's Reign of Terror:

In the decades that followed, Miller did not grow -- except to become more hardened in his extremist views. When he worked as a communications aide in the office of Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions during the Obama years, he was so widely disliked by his conservative colleagues on Capitol Hill that Republican staff in other offices would invent or spread malicious rumors about Miller, such as that he liked to play with porcelain dolls. (A White House official insists that any such characterization of his time on the Hill is "inaccurate and baseless gossip.")

The staffers at the time never dreamed that he'd ever amount to much more than a punch line or an obscure cautionary tale of what happens when you read too many far-right hate websites and dive into Washington's most feverish swamps.

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It had ED-209 voice, in case you were wondering what phase of dystopia we're in.

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The incinerator is usually used by animal control officers to dispose of euthanised animals, but local authorities said it can also be used by law enforcement to burn seized narcotics. [...]

Before evacuating themselves, many employees put on masks and helped get the animals out. Some staff were exposed to the smoke for more than an hour, and several began to feel sick. All 14 went to the emergency room, where they spent about three hours in a hyperbaric oxygen chamber to combat the effects of smoke inhalation. [...]

The impacted animals were given veterinary care and placed in temporary housing, including four litters of kittens who are being closely monitored because they were closed in a room with the smoke, Ms Halverson told the BBC's US partner, CBS News.

A restoration team has also begun decontaminating the building, she said, but the process will take at least two weeks to a month.

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Charlie Kirk's Legacy Deserves No Mourning:

The white Christian nationalist provocateur wasn't a promoter of civil discourse. He preached hate, bigotry, and division.

Charles James Kirk, 31, died on Wednesday from a gunshot to the neck at a Utah Valley University campus event just as he was trying to deflect a question about mass shootings by suggesting they were largely a function of gang violence. He died with a net worth of $12 million, which he made by espousing horrific and bigoted views in the name of advancing Christian nationalism. The foundation of his empire was the group he cofounded and led, Turning Point USA, which is a key youth-recruitment arm of the MAGA movement. Kirk was able to launch Turning Point at the age of 18 because he received money from Tea Party member Bill Montgomery, right-wing donor Foster Feiss, and his own father, also a prolific right-wing donor. He was an unrepentant racist, transphobe, homophobe, and misogynist who often wrapped his bigotry in Bible verses because there was no other way to pretend that it was morally correct. He had children, as do many vile people.

It is rude of me to say all of this, because we live in a culture where manners are often valued more than truth. That is why a slew of pundits and politicians have raced to portray Kirk's activities, which harmed many vulnerable people, in a positive light -- and to give him the benefit of the doubt that he did not grant to anyone who wasn't white, Christian, straight, and male. California Governor Gavin Newsom framed Kirk's project as a healthy democratic exercise: "The best way to honor Charlie's memory is to continue his work: engage with each other, across ideology, through spirited discourse. In a democracy, ideas are tested through words and good-faith debate." This downwardly defines both "discourse" and "good-faith."

There is no requirement to take part in this whitewashing campaign, and refusing to join in doesn't make anyone a bad person. It's a choice to write an obituary that begins "Joseph Goebbels was a gifted marketer and loving father to six children."

Molly White:

Ashley Rindsberg and Fox News are furious at Wikipedia editors for "attacking" Charlie Kirk by... listing the viewpoints he prominently and publicly advocated

Charlie Kirk in His Own Words:

• Civil rights: "We made a huge mistake when we passed the Civil Rights Act in the mid-1960s."
• The death penalty: "[The death penalty] should be public, should be quick, should be televised... I think at a certain age, it's an initiation... At what age should you start to see public executions?"
• Empathy: "I can't stand the word empathy, actually. I think empathy is a made up new age term that does a lot of damage."
• Guns: "It's worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment."
• Martin Luther King Jr.: "MLK was awful. He's not a good person. He said one good thing he actually didn't believe."
• Transgender people: "You're an abomination to God."

Over the course of the last night, Bluesky took aim at many but not all posts wishing Kirk a restorative piss bath. [...]

The reason provided to me and others by an automated Bluesky email was that typing the phrase "rest in piss" is tantamount to "glorifying violence, including the promotion of harmful acts that cause widespread harm and suffering, as well as showing admiration or glorification of the offenders responsible for such acts."

I appealed my suspension, arguing a simple counterpoint: No it isn't.

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US citizens: Submit an official comment Against the EPA's plan to rescind its ability to limit greenhouse gas emissions from any industry and gut vehicle standards needed to fight global heating.

Here's how to make the actionnetwork.org letter campaign linked above work without running the site's nonfree JavaScript code. (See https://gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-trap.html for why that issue matters.)

First, make sure you have deactivated JavaScript in your browser or are using the LibreJS plug-in.

I have done the next step for you: I added `?nowrapper=true' to the end of the campaign URL before posting it above. That should bring you to a page that starts with, "Letter campaigns will not work without JavaScript!"

They indeed won't work without some manual help, but the following simple method seems adequate for many of them, including this one.

To start, fill in the personal information answers in the box on the right side of the page. That's how you say who's sending the letter.

Then click the "START WRITING" button. That will take you to a page that can't function without nonfree JavaScript code. (To ensure it doesn't function perversely by running that nonfree code, you can enable LibreJS or disable JavaScript by visiting that page.) You can finish sending without that code By editing its URL in the browser's address bar, as follows:

First, go to the end and insert `&nowrapper=true'. Then tell the browser to visit that URL. This should give you a version of the page that works without JavaScript. Edit the subject and body of your letter. Finally, click on the "SEND LETTER" button, and you're done.

This method seems to work for letter campaigns that send the letters to a fixed list of recipients, the same recipients for every sender. Editing and revisiting the URL is the only additional step needed to bypass the nonfree JavaScript code. I'm sure you'll agree it is a small effort for the result of supporting the campaign without opening your computer to unjust (and potentially malicious) software.

Given how weirdly comprehensive of the population the CDC's list is, you might reasonably be asking, "Geeze, is there anybody not covered?" Yes, but apparently not many: Your Local Epidemiologist reports that there's an estimate that 75% of the adult US population is covered by the "at least one underlying condition" exception.

And that's my point: you're probably covered by it. Every adult you know under 65 and a whole lot of adolescents is probably covered by it. Just statistically, everyone, including you, has something like three in four odds of being one of the exceptions.

(If you're not covered by it, congratulations, you're in something like the top quartile of healthiness in this country. I haven't forgotten about you: keep reading to find out how you can get a vaccination, too.) [...]

Look, because I believe pedantry is a Defense Against the Dark Arts skill, I feel the urgent need to point out to you: it's not that you are approved or not by the FDA to receive the Covid booster, contrary to how the FDA phrases things. What the FDA approves is what the drug company is allowed to claim their pharmaceutical is for. [...]

The difference between a food and a drug and a nutritional supplement is in their marketing.

Previously, previously, previously.

The intervals of a piano are named roughly after the distances between them. Here are the names of them relative to C (and frequency ratios explained below):

The names are all one more than the number of half-steps because they predate people believing zero was a real number and the vernacular hasn’t been updated since.

The most important interval is the octave. Two notes an octave apart are so similar that have the same name and it’s the length of the repeating pattern on the piano. The second most important interval is the fifth, composed of seven half-steps. The notes on the piano form a looping pattern of fifth intervals in this order:

G♭ D♭ A♭ E♭ B♭ F C G D A E B F♯

If the intervals were turned to perfect fifths this wouldn’t wrap around exactly right, it would be off by a very small amount called the pythagorean comma. which at is about 0.01. In standard 12 tone equal temperament that error is spread evenly across all 12 intervals and is barely audible even to very well trained human ears.

Musical compositions have what’s called a tonic, which is the note which it starts and ends on, and a scale, which is the set of notes used in the composition. The most common scales are the pentatonic, corresponding to the black notes, and the diatonic, corresponding to the white notes. Since the pentatonic can be thought of as the diatonic with two notes removed everything below will talk about the diatonic. This simplification isn’t perfectly true, but since there aren’t any strong dissonances in the pentatonic scale you can play by feel and its usage is much less theory heavy. Most wind chimes are pentatonic.

Conventionally people talk about musical compositions having a ‘key’, which is a bit of a conflation of tonic and scale. When a key isn’t followed by the term ‘major’ or ‘minor’ it usually means ‘the scale which is the white notes on the piano’. Those scales can form seven different ‘modes’ (which are scales) following this pattern:

This construction is the reason why piano notes are sorted into black and white in the way they are. It’s called the circle of the fifths.

When it goes past the end all notes except the tonic move (because that’s the reference) and it jumps to the other end.

The days of the week aren’t common but they should be because but nobody remembers the standard names. The Tuesday mode is usually called ‘major’ and it has the feel of things moving up from the tonic. The Friday mode is usually called ‘minor’ and it has the feel of things moving down from the tonic.

The second most important interval is the third. To understand the relationships it helps to use some math. The frequency of an octave has a ratio of 2, a fifth is 3/2, a major third is 5/4 and a minor third is 6/5. When you move by an interval you multiply by it, so going up by an major third and then a minor third is 5/4 * 6/5 = 3/2 so you wind up at a fifth. Yes it’s very confusing that intervals are named after numbers which they’re only loosely related to while also talking about actual fractions. It’s even more annoying that fifths use 3 and thirds use 5. Music terminology has a lot of cruft.

The arrangement of keys on a pianor can be adjusted to follow the pattern of thirds. Sometimes electronic pianos literally use this arrangement, called the harmonic table note layout. It goes up by major thirds to the right, fifths to the upper right, and minor thirds to the upper left:

If the notes within a highlighted region are tuned perfectly it’s called just intonation (Technically any tuning which uses integer ratios is called ‘just intonation’ but this is the most canonical of them.) The pattern wraps around horizontally because of the diesis, which is the difference between 128/125 and one, or about 0.02. It wraps around vertically because of the syntonic comma, which is the difference between 81/80 and one, or about 0.01. The pythagorean comma is the difference between 3^12/2^19 and one, about 0.01. The fact of any two of those commas are small can be used to show that the other is small, so it’s only two coincidences, not three.

Jazz intervals use factors of 7. For example the blues note is either 7/5 or 10/7 depending on context. But that’s a whole other subject.

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If the far-right misogynist with a bad haircut wants to villainize independent women, Jezebel is more than happy to be the hag of his nightmares. [...]

Then I found the crown jewel: "Shit Your Pants Spell." Review: "It really worked. Thank you." At that point, it was clear I'd need to order multiple curses, at different severity levels and price points, to guarantee results.

Update: I did not have Jezebel on my "preemptively kowtow to the fascist regime" bingo card, but here we are. "On the recommendation of our lawyers", "driven by an abundance of caution".

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